I haven’t learned a whole lot, but 50 is a little old to start taking Judo. It’s not stopping me but I wish I started when I was younger. Then again, I’m probably in better shape now than when I was younger so I’m not sure if it would’ve helped.

I took some time off to figure out what to do for exercise (besides Judo) and I started visiting some local gyms. Gyms in my neighborhood are like Starbucks and you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting one. Of course swinging dead cats would probably lead to other more pressing problems. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to do anything about it last week because I had to work until 5:30PM, 7PM, 7:30PM, and 9:30PM because of some wonderful planning that stacked up four deadlines on the same day and I still got yelled at for no doing enough. Fortunately, it’s not so bad this week.

I got a two-year 24-Hour Fitness Super Sport membership through Costco. It’s more expensive but there’s a Super Sport on the way home from work and I thought it might be less crowded because it’s more expensive. I’ve been twice so far and the place is underwhelming. It’s crowded, and the machines that are spaced out to give the illusion that there’s more equipment than there really is. There’s also no place to do deadlifts, very few kettlebells, no good pull-up bar, and only two rowing machines (one of which is on its last legs).

I forgot what regular gyms are like. I waited 20 minutes for a woman to get off the non-creaky rower and she was rowing at a 4 minute pace. After I got home I calculated how far she went. The rower shows things in an odd way, (how long for 500m) so I figured out:

She was going about the speed that a glacier advances.

I just wanted to do 3 sprints of 250m which I did it at a 1:39 min/500m pace. I rested about a minute between each so it took me about five minutes to go 750m.

But all those calculations are irrelevant. What I’m really complaining about is that I waited 20 minutes to do less than 3 minutes on the rower but I’m too lazy to try to get my money back so I think I’ll just keep going. Besides, it looks like I need to stay later, and that puts me in peak traffic unless I go to the gym and kill some time. Ugh.